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The Forgotten Henry Simons Florida State University Law Review Volume 41 Issue 1 Article 2 2013 The Forgotten Henry Simons Daniel Shaviro [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Daniel Shaviro, The Forgotten Henry Simons, 41 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 1 (2013) . https://ir.law.fsu.edu/lr/vol41/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Florida State University Law Review by an authorized editor of Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW THE FORGOTTEN HENRY SIMONS Daniel Shaviro VOLUME 41 FALL 2013 NUMBER 1 Recommended citation: Daniel Shaviro, The Forgotten Henry Simons, 41 FLA. ST. U. L. REV. 1 (2013). THE FORGOTTEN HENRY SIMONS DANIEL SHAVIRO* I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1 II. SIMONS’ METEORIC CAREER ............................................................................. 5 III. HENRY SIMONS: A DIFFERENT TYPE OF LIBERTARIAN? .................................... 10 A. Philosophical Libertarianism .................................................................... 11 B. Assessing and Explaining Simons’ “Interventionism” ............................... 15 C. Simons’ Support for Progressive Income Taxation .................................... 20 IV. SIMONS ON THE INCOME TAX ............................................................................ 25 A. Income Taxation Versus Consumption Taxation ....................................... 25 1. Why Did Simons Prefer the Income Tax? ............................................ 25 2. Simons’ View of Realization and Deferral ........................................... 29 3. What Might Simons Think Today About the Choice Between Income and Consumption Taxation? ............................................................... 33 (a) More Pro-Income Tax? .................................................................. 33 (b) Potentially Pro-Consumption Tax? .............................................. 35 V. CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................... 37 I. INTRODUCTION Surely just about everyone in the U.S. federal income tax field has heard of Henry Simons, although mainly for just one thing: his fa- mous definition of “personal income” as the market value of one’s consumption plus change in net worth during the relevant period,1 as stated in his classic 1938 work, Personal Income Taxation. Simons’ formulation of what became known as the Haig-Simons income defi- nition provided a central orientation point for U.S. tax policy thinking for many decades thereafter. Even today, it remains extremely important. The man behind the definition is, in some respects, considerably less well-known. For example, while most tax aficionados probably would identify him as a strong advocate of the federal income tax and of using a broadly defined base, fewer may know how comfortable he was with retaining the realization principle as a practical accommo- dation.2 Fewer still may be aware that he advocated eliminating the corporate income tax, conditioned only on a rule change providing for shareholder-level gain realization when appreciated stock (or other * Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation, NYU Law School. I am grateful to Miranda Perry, Chris Sanchirico, Robert Van Horn, and the participants in conferences at the USC and FSU Law Schools for helpful comments on an earlier draft. 1. More precisely, Simons states: “Personal income may be defined as the algebraic sum of (1) the market value of rights exercised in consumption and (2) the change in the value of the store of property rights between the beginning and end of the period in ques- tion.” HENRY C. SIMONS, PERSONAL INCOME TAXATION: THE DEFINITION OF INCOME AS A PROBLEM OF FISCAL POLICY 50 (1938) [hereinafter SIMONS, TAXATION]. 2. See, e.g., HENRY C. SIMONS, FEDERAL TAX REFORM 78 (1950) [hereinafter SIMONS, REFORM]. 2 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 41:1 property) was transferred by gift or bequest, and accompanied by the suggestion that dividends not be taxed until the shareholder had ful- ly recovered her basis in the underlying stock.3 Perhaps fewest of all realize that today, in active intellectual memory, there are actually two Henry Simonses—albeit each the same person, not just biologically but also intellectually— remembered in two mostly distinct communities. First, of course, there is the income tax community’s Henry Simons, who, in the course of advocating a broad tax base and “drastic progression”4 memorably demolished intellectual opponents,5 vehemently de- nounced support for his own bottom-line positions that was based on reasoning about utility or sacrifice,6 and lucidly addressed how a workable income definition could actually be implemented.7 Simons was not just an income tax writer, however. At the time of his death, most of his published work discussed other issues—for ex- ample, the case for a competitive free-market economy,8 the problems caused by labor unions,9 and his approach to monetary policy.10 The nontax writings included not only Simons’ best-known work at the time of his death11—which Personal Income Taxation cites as its un- derlying policy guide12—but also the work that he considered his best.13 Moreover, while these writings are little-known today in tax circles, there is a community interested in free enterprise, Chicago- school economic analysis, and libertarianism, to which they remain at least historically important but highly controversial. 3. See id. at 112. 4. SIMONS, TAXATION, supra note 1, at 18. 5. See, e.g., id. at 16-17. 6. See id. at 8-16. 7. See id. at 41-60 (Chapter 2: “The Definition of Income”). 8. HENRY C. SIMONS, A Positive Program for Laissez Faire: Some Proposals for a Liberal Economic Policy, in ECONOMIC POLICY FOR A FREE SOCIETY 40 (1948) [hereinafter SIMONS, Positive Program]. 9. See Henry C. Simons, Some Reflections on Syndicalism, 52 J. POL. ECON. 1 (1944). 10. See Henry C. Simons, Rules versus Authorities in Monetary Policy, 44 J. POL. ECON 1 (1936). Simons’ previously published nontax writings were collected and posthu- mously published in Economic Policy for a Free Society (1948). The book includes twelve previously published essays that together are more than 300 pages long. This admittedly is slightly shorter than the combined page count for Personal Income Taxation (1938) plus his only other significant tax policy work, Federal Tax Reform (1950), but the latter was only posthumously published. 11. Aaron Director, Prefatory Note to ECONOMIC POLICY FOR A FREE SOCIETY, supra note 8, at v, v-vi (stating that Simons’ “best-known essay” was A Positive Program for Lais- sez Faire, initially published in 1934, which is discussed in more detail in Part III, infra). 12. See SIMONS, TAXATION, supra note 1, at 2 n.1. 13. See George J. Stigler, Henry Calvert Simons, 17 J.L. & ECON. 1, 5 (1974) (stating that Simons once said that his article on monetary policy, Rules versus Authorities in Mon- etary Policy, was “the best piece of writing he had produced”). 2013] THE FORGOTTEN HENRY SIMONS 3 George Stigler called Simons the “Crown Prince of . the Chicago school of economics,”14 and others have agreed that he was its “prime architect.”15 What is more, Simons labeled and regarded himself not merely as a free market supporter but more specifically as a libertar- ian. However, some aspects of Simons’ work—including, but not lim- ited to, his advocacy of progressive income taxation—have caused this characterization to rankle in some quarters. Indeed, the wounds are sufficiently fresh that the title of one recent entry, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, used the present tense in pro- claiming: “Henry Simons Is Not a Supporter of Free Enterprise.”16 I first encountered the second Henry Simons at a lecture given by Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago Law School about twenty years ago. As I recall, Coase devoted a large portion of his remarks to denouncing Simons for what Coase considered an inappropriate will- ingness to rely on governmental regulatory solutions to market fail- ure, rather than asking how markets could themselves handle these problems.17 My then-Chicago colleague, the late Walter Blum, a Si- mons protégé who kindly acted as a mentor to me when I first en- tered law teaching, told me the next day that Coase had expressed surprise when Walter told him after the lecture of Simons’ continuing prominence as an intellectual architect of the income tax. It may seem most improbable that Simons, at least in his own self-assessment, was “at the same time an extreme libertarian and a believer in massive wealth redistribution.”18 As Herbert Kiesling notes, however, while “[o]ne can wonder how such a strange mixture 14. Id. at 1. 15. See Bruce Caldwell, The Chicago School, Hayek, and Neoliberalism, in BUILDING CHICAGO ECONOMICS: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S MOST POWERFUL ECONOMICS PROGRAM 301, 304-06 (Robert Van Horn et al. eds., 2011) (accepting the “prime architect” claim although disagreeing in other respects with Van Horn’s and Mirowski’s analysis of the Chicago school’s early history); Rob Van Horn & Philip Mirowski, The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism, in THE ROAD FROM MONT PÈLERIN: THE MAKING OF THE NEOLIBERAL THOUGHT COLLECTIVE 139, 140
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